Starship Reentry

Wow! Watch SpaceX Starship re-enter Earth's atmosphere in these incredible views
VideoFromSpace

This is from the last test flight of the SpaceX Starship which happened two months ago. Visible signs of heating don't show up until after the three minute mark. Up till then we just see the upper surfaces of clouds flying by a hundred miles below us. Once the heating starts we get another two minutes of it getting more intense until the signal is lost. After that we just get noise and filler.

I was blown away when I saw this the first time - it's like the first time this has every been recorded by a camera. Before this it was all just theoretical. Oh, there were the rocket scientists mathematical explanations and evidence of extreme heating after the fact, but for all we know it could have been dragons roasting what they thought were dragon sized marshmallows. I know, not likely, but you know, photos or it didn't happen. So now we have photos and I don't see any dragons.

Besides getting video of reentry heating we were getting it live because of the Starlink Satellites. Because they launch them is box lot quantities I was thinking they were itty bitty little things, but they aren't. Each one weighs like 600 pounds and carries a solar panel array that expands to 100 feet. I'm going to take a closer look at these things one of these days.

The Silicon Graybeard tells us SpaceX is getting ready to make another test flight real soon now. So far they seem to be making progress, no catastrophic failures that have made them think they need to go back and rethink their plan.

I find jibber jabber annoying, but YouTube has a mute button. The last couple of minutes of the video they display a couple heat shield tiles. These are the same kind of things that fell off of the Space Shuttle Columbia and caused it to disintegrate on reentry back in 2003. Hopefully the glue guys have got a better glue now.

Previous posts about reentry here.